Be careful how you apply the exposure in Quick Develop. A single arrow means 1/3 stop, a twin arrow means one stop. It's easy to press the wrong arrow. Look for a tutorial on the usefulness of the Quick Develop mode on a site called Lightroom Killer Tips. Many people ignore Quick Develop but it's really useful for applying a uniform adjustment across images to achieve indiividually different exposure changes, configured on the original exposure, if you see what I mean. Thus,each pic gets 1/3 stop extra or less, for instance, based on the exposure of that particular pic at the time you took it.
PS. Haven't been using auto tone but after your post, tried it. It does as you say - it seems to be a useless mess.
S